Have you caught yourself obsessively checking your blog stats?  If you say no, am I going to call you out.  We have all obsessed over our stats.

I think this is something every blogger goes through.  In fact, my friend Marcus Sheridan was just wrote a great post about how he once obsessed about traffic numbers and Alexa ranking. Stats are extremely motivating, but they rarely bring you closer to your dream.

If you have been following me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I a reading Jon Acuff’s new book Quitter.  Man this book rocks!

I have highlighted so many of Jon’s nuggets of brilliance, but the one that was the muse for today’s post was – measure hustle.  Jon’s point is that too often we try come up with elaborate metrics to measure our business success.  And rarely do these metrics actually indicate a true measure of success.

So, instead of obsessively checking your blog stats or conversion rates, measure your hustle.  Set goals that are based on working hard and things that are in your control.  Jon provides a few examples,

• Measure the number of days you got up early to work on your dream
• Measure the number of emails you responded to
• Measure the number of dream jobs you applied to
• Measure the number posts you write
• Measure the time you spent writing your posts

Jon states, “measuring effort you’re putting in is a much more honest gauge of your progress.”  You can’t control how many come to your site every day.  You can’t control where Google ranks your latest post in the search engine results pages.  But, you can control how hard you hustle.

My dad used to say, and I am sure most dads have said, “Hard work will never kill you.”  Well, I will go a step further.  Only through hard work will you be able to accomplish your dreams.

Around the blogosphere, there are so many people writing about how to make money without having to work hard.  You know the get rich quick types when you see them.  But, you know what I have noticed in the last three years that I have been blogging?  Most of the get rich quick types aren’t from three years aren’t around now.  And, I guarantee you that they aren’t rich.

Instead, I encourage you to follow the hard workers.  The bloggers who are willing to go the extra mile in order to accomplish their dreams.  If you are looking for a few of these types, check out Jk Allen, Mark Schaefer, Sarah Robinson, Steve Chou and Farnoosh Brock.  Model your hustle after these people.

All of my life I have been a hard worker.  I like to work.  In fact, I have typically worked harder and more hours than most of my colleagues.  That’s just me.  But, Jonathan Fields wrote an awesome article that humbled me – Thats What Pros Do.  In that article, Jonathan described everything that he did in the month of January.

• Published 17 blog posts
• Organized, promoted and conducted 4 conference calls (3 for the blog, 1 for my private Creation Tribe)
• Processed more than 6,000 emails
• Updated my Facebook status dozens of times
• Tweeted hundreds of times
• Read hundreds of posts, articles and a few books
• Had 14 skype/phone meetings and interviews
• Attended 5 face-to-face meetings and events,
• Meditated, moved my body and played guitar every day
• Ate breakfast and dinner with my family nearly every day, and…
• Wrote 25,000 words and completed the manuscript for my next book

That made me realize that Jonathan was working much harder on his business than I was.  Now, a lot of people would feel defeated by this, but Jonathan’s post motivated me.  This set the bar for me.  While I might not be able to do all of this due to being a full-time lawyer in my day job, I know that if I want this dream job to become a reality, I need to be doing everything I can to match Jonathan’s hustle.

How do you measure your hustle?  What does your daily schedule look like?  And remember, “the difference between try and triumph is a little umph.”

Photo by .scooter